For over a decade, the DigiTech Whammy has, more or less, owned foot-controlled pitch-shifting outright. There have been challengers. There have been contenders for the crown. But when the dust settles, in the imaginations of most, what one hears are Tom Morello’s dive-bombs, Dimebag’s squeals, and Jack White reminding everyone that a guitar pedal can also be a weapon. Boss, a company that can similarly dominate a category, is now dancing at the Whammy’s party. And it’s not messing around.
The XS-100 splits its personality in two. There’s a treadle-operated pitch bender that handles the Floyd-Rose-style dives and impossible upward screams, and a footswitch-operated transposer for down-tuning and virtual-capo duty. That’s a smart division of labor. You get expressive, real-time pitch-mangling under your toe, and instant, glitch-free re-tuning in an immediately adjacent position, without needing to choose which personality and functionality make the grade on your board.
When you add up the possible tones the XS-100 can span, the numbers are impressive. You can shift up to four octaves up or down via the rocker treadle. That’s eight octaves of total range, which I’d venture is more pitch-shifting range than most players will ever need. But if you’re inclined to experiment with the outer limits of your guitar, you’ll love having it. There are so many unusual, unexpected sounds here, in addition to scads of very musical, practical harmonizing and re-tuning capabilities too.
The sounds you can keep in memory are a huge asset too. Thirty slots are available, and can be scanned via the compact but practical LCD screen. MIDI and USB-C capabilities, meanwhile, extend the pedal’s possibilities for studio rats and committed pitch-shifting nerds to take the XS-100 to its furthest reaches.
Pitch in Practice
Here’s the thing about pitch shifters—the spec sheet is basically theater until you ask the real question: Does it track cleanly on chords? Polyphonic pitch-shifting has almost always demanded some kind of tone sacrifice in the shape of digital artifacts, and sustained leads and complex voicings tend to expose every weakness in an algorithm. Boss does its bit to solve the problem with what it calls Adaptive Focus—a fast processing method that uses high-resolution 24-bit conversion. In practice the payoff is pretty clear. The XS-100 preserves attack and tonal characteristics, even on full chords, without the warbly, seasick artifacts that plague lesser shifters. Whether you’re layering a full-step-up harmony under a lead line or dropping an entire chord progression down an octave for that “did the room just get bigger?” effect, the tracking stays glassy-smooth.
“The XS-100 preserves attack and tonal characteristics, even on full chords, without the warbly, seasick artifacts that plague lesser shifters.”
Does it top the Whammy? That depends what you’re after. The XS-100’s shifting often sounds cleaner and its range is wider. But it trades away some of the Whammy’s beloved knack for chaos and unpredictability. After all, the Whammy’s slight wildness is for many players a feature, not a bug. The XS-100’s detailed menu system also demands a bit more patience than the Whammy’s dead-simple stomp-and-go approach. The Boss is definitely a deeper tool, but that depth can come at the cost of intuitiveness. How you relate to those tradeoffs probably makes a trial run at your local shop a good idea. But with 30 presets, a genuinely sculptable balance control for blending dry and shifted signals, and that eight-octave range, the XS-100 gives serious players a lot more to work with once they’ve climbed the learning curve. With so much to explore, diving in blind could be a lot of fun for a lot of folks.
The Verdict
At $349, the XS-100 isn’t inexpensive. But it’s certainly not a novelty. It’s a legitimate, well-engineered challenger in a category where the Whammy stubbornly remains the standard. If you long for expressive dive-bombs, on-the-fly drop tuning, or harmonized leads that need to survive contact with a full chord voicing, the XS-100 can earn its keep. The Whammy cult is nothing if not loyal; the throne hasn’t necessarily changed hands. But for the first time in a long while, there’s a pitch pedal that can put up a real fight for it.
XS-100
Polyphonic Pitch-shift Guitar Pedal with LCD Screen, 30 Memory Slots, MIDI I/O, Dry-through, Expression Pedal, and Effect and Tune Down Controls
